Final Reflections: Agency
"By forcing the people of the center to live with their own garbage, the activists help to expose the material effects of the process of urban development. This act also undermines the strategic absence and willful ignorance needed to support the 'public secret' that wastes do not just disappear magically. Moreover, these events bring to the fore broader conflicts over the sustainability of the urban area and issues of environmental justice..." (Moore 2008, 607)
"While much of the world doesn't get to share in the United States' high standard of living, more and more of the world's people are sharing the burden of America's throw-away culture." (Moyers, 1990, 6)
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In one week of tracking my waste, I collected just over 1 lb of tissues, paper napkins, toilet paper rolls, apple cores and Q-tips. I used 191 gallons of water and wasted the equivalent of 4 gallons of gas. As much as my bag o' trash brought my consumption and waste to attention, there were so many components of my waste that remained invisible. The waste from food packaging and cooking represents a significant amount of waste, as I saw in collecting the trash from cooking a 15-person dinner.
The films we watched in class, The Story of Electronics and Oceans of Plastic represent two additional ways of making waste visible and present. I felt implicated in the plastic in the stomach of the flesh footed shear water, in the toxic impact of computer dumps in China. These films and my own process of making waste visible leave me feeling guilty, but more importantly, frustrated with our capitalist throw-away society. While the magnitude of the problem is awesome, that frustration is essential to taking that feeling of being complicit in a wasteful society of consumption and finding a way to affect positive change.
Just as those living in close proximity to the Oaxacan dump had agency to utilize waste and access to the dump as political leverage, I, too, have agency. A crucial component of this agency is just awareness, that through noticing and thinking about the reality of the paper and plastic that I throw away, I am already disrupting the invisible narrative of waste in our culture. That awareness prompts me to carefully pick out one napkin in the dining hall instead of grabbing a handful, to bring my own coffee mug to Carol's.
Yet my awareness is not enough. Awareness of the waste I produce and the role that it plays in our Western consumer culture only brings one component of the economy of waste to light. The cinders of a city's trash are shipped in toxic barrels halfway around the globe. Piles of our old computers poison lives on the other side of the world. The top to my plastic water bottle kills a tiny bird across the ocean. Just as the colonial flows of raw materials left India and the Horn of Africa, bound for England, just as oil tankers transport plastic in its most basic form to my gas pump, this neocolonialism of waste sends barges of toxic ash and masses of deadly plastic back across the ocean. And these international geographies of waste have devastating impacts on people and environments around the globe. My agency is not just to recognize the waste I create, but to ask questions, to demand answers. I will wait to buy a new cellphone, ask where my old laptop will be sent, write to my congressmen to support product takeback laws. But it is also to think long and hard about capitalism, about the inherent superiority of business models of development and change, about the consumption and waste essential to my Western lifestyle. This critical approach to a lifestyle "designed for the dump" is a small step, but a crucial one.
